


the friend of the fourth decade

by De_Nugis



Series: Renovation [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-21
Updated: 2012-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-02 07:37:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam catches some rays on his sixty-ninth birthday. Dean has a bit of a meltdown. There is a hallmark moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the friend of the fourth decade

**Author's Note:**

> Birthday fic for Laurificus.
> 
> Takes place about forty years after the first Renovation story; mentions stuff from "Momma never told me there'd be days like these."
> 
> Title from James Merrill.

It's ridiculously warm for May. Been mild all winter, more mud than snow, green grass back early, windows open in March. But it's not supposed to be up past eighty right at the beginning of May. Dean's actually sweating as he hauls the bags through the side door into the house. Eddie winds around his ankles, trying to trip him up.

"Yes, I got cat food," Dean tells him. "Yes, I got the canned kind. Yes, I got the more expensive cans, the ones you like. You know, you were supposed to be a mouser. You were supposed to get your calories ridding us of household pests. Not have us fetching you luxury takeout cuisine while the mice have some kind of orgy rave in our walls."

There's a silence where Sam should be shouting into the kitchen that it's because every time Eddie tries to catch a mouse Dean rescues it and puts it down in the basement to convalesce. Easy for a cat to get discouraged, when its efforts to act on its instincts are thwarted and unappreciated. So Sam claims. Sam’s often wrong.

"Where's Sam?" Dean asks Eddie. Eddie jumps up on the counter and pokes his nose into one of the bags, nibbles a bit on the carrot tops. Sam and Eddie have a lot in common, including a species inappropriate taste for rabbit food. Though Eddie mostly pukes up his greenery on the rug later. At least Sam doesn’t do that.

"Sam?" calls Dean. There's no answer. Which, not like at his age Sam's not allowed to go out for a walk by himself. No cause for Dean's heart rate to be speeding up. No reason why he should rush through putting the groceries away. Or why he should do a quick tour of the house, making sure that Sam's not in the living room or the bedroom or the study and, well, not answering when he's called.

"No one in this damn house ever comes when I call," Dean says to Eddie. Eddie jumps fluidly up onto Sam's study chair, curls up into a compact black and white ball, and goes to sleep. "Be that way," says Dean. 

It's May 2nd and it's sunny and gorgeous and over eighty. No wonder Sam wanted to go out and the cat wants to sleep in the sun. Dean might go out himself. Enjoy the weather. Maybe run into Sam, coming back from that walk – more a stroll, probably – that he’s got every right to be taking. Doctor said moderate exercise is good. Sam’s not supposed to be racing up hills or anything, but he can go for a walk.

Dean goes out the front door, just for variety. He can stroll, or maybe amble, down to the lake. Saunter, even.

He’s halfway across the lawn when he sees the long shape stretched on the sagging, broken off stub of dock they’ve never got round to fixing. Dean takes the rest of the slope at something more like a mad dash, to hell with creaky knees. Sam’s collapsed there, Dean goes out for a freaking hour to do the damn shopping and he comes back to Sam passed out, another heart attack, or he’s fucking fallen and he can’t get up or he’s . . . 

Sunbathing. Dean skids to a halt as Sam sits up and blinks at him. He’s got one of their old car blankets spread over the boards and his t-shirt is wadded up where his head had been. And he’s wearing _shorts_. 

“Hi,” he says. “What are you doing the hundred yard sprint for?”

Dean makes it the rest of the way to Sam at a slow stalk. Something that conveys dignity and disapproval. Something that won’t show if he’s fucking shaking.

“I see my brother in an outfit that’s a danger to himself and others, I’m not going to take my time putting a stop to it,” he says.

Sam makes an exasperated clicking noise and lies down again. 

“I’d blame your stupid shorts prejudice on you being old,” he says to the blue sunny sky, “Except you were like this when you were thirty. But I’m very open to any no shorts alternatives you might propose.” He winks. Sam in shorts trying to do a suggestive wink is a terrible sight.

“Not here,” says Dean. “For chrissake.” 

The dock isn’t all that solid and in summer these big creepy ass dock spiders spin their big creepy ass webs all over it. Even if dock sex is something Sam should be doing these days, this isn’t the dock for it. 

“Why don’t you come inside?” Dean goes on. Before some huge arachnid crawls onto Sam’s unprotected calves and startles him. Sam’s supposed to be avoiding sudden shocks. “You can change back into human clothes and I’ll cook you dinner. I got, like, whole wheat pasta and ten different kinds of greens.”

“You go ahead,” says Sam. “Put on the pasta water. I’m staying out for a bit. Might never have another chance to wear shorts on my birthday.”

By which Sam probably just means that it’s not usually eighty-four degrees on May 2nd in Vermont. Dean still ups his glare from disapproving to malevolent. Sam basks obliviously. Dean looks him over, a hedonistic sprawl of limbs, no regard for the dangers of splintery wood or lurking spiders or skin cancer. No apology for the absurd distance from bare toes to bad hair. His eyes are crinkled shut against the sun. It deepens the surrounding crow’s feet, but somehow it makes him look younger, glimpse of a Stanford kid squinting through the windscreen, back when they always seemed to be driving east in the morning and west in the afternoon. It’s incongruous, with the grey hair. 

The hairs on Sam’s chest are grey, too. Dean contemplates them. The steady rise and fall of breath there is Sam’s best feature, the one Dean keeps coming back to. 

“You get startled to death by a spider, you’ll be sorry,” Dean says darkly. Sam just laughs, stretches and then sinks back, as bonelessly content as Eddie. You’d think he’d be more twitchy, all that exposed skin, no layers between him and the stuff could be coming at him.

Time was Sam was the control freak, watching Dean’s diet and his alcohol intake, limiting his right to run into burning buildings, buying him a fucking woolly scarf their second winter here and making him wear it. Now it’s swung back the other way. Now that they’re aiming for natural death, Dean’s supposed to have the advantage. He’s older. In a just world, in a world where Sam plays fair, Dean gets to go first. 

But Sam, fucking Sam, who couldn’t make it to twenty-four without a goddamn knife in his back, he has to go and have a heart attack at sixty-eight. Trying to give Dean one, maybe. Dean was the one ate pure cholesterol for two decades while Sam was working his way through salads, leaf by dainty leaf. No power on earth will convince Dean that Sam didn’t steal something that was Dean’s by right. And now he’s sunbathing in shorts.

Shorts are always stupid-looking, especially on Sam. Now they just look reckless, Sam not defending himself. Like a heart condition might find it harder to get him through ankle-length denim. Like the gut-wrenching fondness Dean feels for Sam’s exposed knees and his long skinny shins – more grey hair – for the knobs of his ankles and his big, stupid toes will somehow call down the attention of every eight-legged menace and heart-stopping disaster that’s waiting out there. 

Dean’s kept Sam alive enough years with stupid paranoia. Sam should respect that.

“You should respect me,” Dean says. 

Sam makes a low humming noise. It doesn’t seem to indicate respect. More like the closest he can come to a purr. Too zonked on sun to listen to his brother. To pick up on the static of panic.

“You do know we got dock spiders out here,” Dean tries next.

“Yeah, I know,” says Sam. “But it’s too early in the year for them. They should be around come June.” Like it’s something he’s looking forward to. 

“It’s over eighty at the beginning of May,” says Dean. “Spiders have probably been hatching for weeks. Or coming out of hibernation or whatever.”

Sam opens his eyes all the way and frowns at Dean, as if he’s finally caught on that Dean’s trying to get at something here. Even though Dean himself isn’t sure what the fuck he’s on about. It’s certainly not dock spiders.

“OK,” says Sam, “So let’s assume there are spiders. Spiders that hibernate. Spiders that emerge from hibernation in April. Spiders that could conceivably invade my personal space. Even if I accept your improbable premise, why are we worrying about this? Dock spiders aren’t venomous or anything.”

“I know that,” says Dean. Shouts, rather. For some reason he’s fucking shouting. “This isn’t about the stupid spiders, Sam, Jesus. Will you just come in?”

Sam would be well within his rights to deck Dean at that point. But he must catch something helpless and embarrassing in Dean’s eyes because his expression goes from superior know-it-all Sam to outraged at Dean yelling for no reason Sam to compassionate resignation Sam. Dean hates that last expression more than he hates any of the other looks he’s seen on Sam’s face the last sixty-nine years. It’s the one Sam came up with when Dr. Worthen started talking about damage some time in the past and whether Sam had ever had rheumatic fever or anything like that. Sam had gone all evasive, until she left the room to order up more of her damn tests. Then he’d turned to Dean with a fucking _genuine_ rueful smile and said, “Guess this is why we tell the kids to stay off the demon blood, huh?” and then, “Sorry.”

Sam still doesn’t get why Dean had walked out of the hospital without a word and driven till he ran out of gas. He has no fucking clue that Dean’s madder about that damn “sorry” than he was about the fucking demon blood thing in the first place. He’d just gone all gentle and understanding, till Dean would have punched him in the face if that had been something you do to cardiac patients.

“Dean . . .” he says now. He stands up slowly, pulls his t-shirt back on, rolls up the blanket.

“I got back with the groceries and you weren’t in the fucking house, Sam,” says Dean. “I came out and I saw you lying here and I thought . . .” he trails off into a jagged silence, like the places where the murky water shows through the broken boards of the dock. Sam looks at him and Dean wants to start shouting again but he doesn’t.

“Let’s go in and make dinner,” Sam says at last. “I don’t trust you around greens.” He still has enough decency to ignore the fact that his seventy-four year old big brother is basically crying, because he’s the idiot who mistook fucking sunbathing for dead.

 

Dean catches Sam sneaking concerned glances at him all through the cooking and all through dinner and he knows there’s a damn Talk coming. He doesn’t even bother to fight it when Sam sets his fork deliberately across the scattered crumbs of his strawberry rhubarb pie and says, “Dean.” Dean just says, “Yeah,” and he doesn’t even shake off Sam’s hand when he puts it over Dean’s. Sam’s grip is still as strong as ever, his hand still ten times the size it needs to be.

“I’m just going to say it,” says Sam. “I’m going to give you the damn Lifetime movie speech, and you’re going to sit through it. Because it’s my fucking birthday and you can deny me nothing.”

“Just to be clear,” says Dean, “You don’t also want a shiny gold ring that makes you invisible, do you? Because that never ends well.”

Sam just smiles at him and goes inexorably on.

“You know Dr. Worthen says I’m doing fine,” he says. “And you know she’s not much for the comforting lies. According to her, there’s no reason I shouldn’t make it to ninety, if I’m careful. And I’m being careful. Sorry mess of bad habits that you are, I’ll probably outlive you by a decade, easy. But if I don’t . . .”

“Shut up, Sammy,” says Dean. Apparently he’s not as resigned to the Hallmark moment as he’d thought.

“ _You_ shut up,” says Sam. “If I don’t, if something happens, if some grouchy-from-hibernation giant dock spider chows down on me, I just, I figure I’m not going far, OK?”

“You try haunting me and I’ll salt and burn your ass-bones,” says Dean. His voice is pretty steady, considering.

Sam kicks him under the table. Seems like that’s more painful these days, now Dean’s got old guy shins. 

“Ow,” he says.

“That’s not what I meant,” says Sam. “It’s just, you know, here. Four decades in one place. Turning the damn water on and off. Having the pipes freeze anyway. Having the fucking septic tank back up. Living with a pink granite kitchen. Pretty sure most of my memories now are of shit going wrong with the house. So I figure that will be heaven. The greatest hits. Like that time the toilet exploded when you were plunging it. I could relive that one a few hundred times. So that’s where I’ll be. And then it’s where you’ll be. Maybe without the toilet part, for you. So it’s like I said. I won’t be going far.”

Dean has a few words to say about the toilet incident and Sam mocking his pain, but his vocal apparatus is working on other things. Anyway, Sam isn’t paying the slightest attention to him, just looking around at the pink granite kitchen with a fucking unbearable sappy look. It would have been bad on Sam at twenty-two. At sixty-nine it’s downright scary.

“It’ll be here,” he says. “Here’s got to be most of it, right? Almost forty years, that’s got to take up space. Shit, If you do get your fucking stupid wish and go first, I’ll probably find you putting in rose quartz in the upstairs bathroom. Don’t do that, OK?”

Dean clears his throat. He’s a little surprised that it works. 

“I only made things pretty and pink for you, princess,” he says. In his best _Talk’s over, we’re never doing that again, bitch_ voice. The one that also says _I hear you_.

Sam runs his hand along the countertop by the kitchen table. The veins in the granite are flat and shiny, not the wrinkled low relief of Sam’s hand, but otherwise they’re much the same, a meandering, living pattern. 

“You made things pretty and pink because you went and ordered the wrong granite for that billionaire asshole,” he says. “Don’t think I’ll conveniently get Alzheimer’s and not remember.”

“Mr. Thorne,” says Dean. Sam’s idea that he’s got some super sharp memory while Dean’s going a bit fuzzy around the edges is one of Sam’s many wrong ideas. Many, many wrong ideas. Dean can enumerate pretty much every one of them. Counting them up, making sure he’s still got all his lucid and reasonable objections in order, that works as well as those stupid brain exercise things Sam started doing when he turned fifty. “And I didn’t order the wrong granite. Supplier made the mistake.”

“You’ve been holding onto that for decades, haven’t you?” says Sam. 

“You should just be grateful you got your fancy kitchen,” says Dean.

“It’s like having my own Barbie palace,” says Sam. “Now all I need is a working dock so I can sunbathe in my rhinestone bikini. Since you don’t like shorts.”

That’s actually quite an image. Better than shorts, certainly.

“You and your dock fetish,” says Dean. Sam gives him a diagnostic look. 

“I’m onto you, you know,” he says. 

“You’re not onto anything,” says Dean. Even if he _does_ live to ninety (which is a good idea and Dean’s in favor, don’t get him wrong), Sam will never be onto Dean.

“You gave yourself away,” says Sam. “You gave yourself away like you always do. It’s the spiders. Forty years and we never fixed the damn dock because you’re afraid of some totally harmless spiders.”

“I am not,” says Dean. “We’ll do it this year. Doc says swimming’s good, right? For your heart thing. So we’ll fix up the dock.”

“Mmmm,” says Sam. “She didn’t say anything about dock repair. Or battling killer arachnids. We could hire Rick. Sit in deck chairs and watch the younger generation do the work.”

“Ricky’s good,” Dean concedes. He’s kept Clyde Pond Contracting going since Dean retired, even expanded a bit. Replacing slimy dock piles is below his pay grade these days, but he’d do it for his old boss. “Not sure he’s the guy I’d send after giant spiders, though. Can you really see him wielding the flaming Raid and fighting off critter hordes?”

“I’m still not sure why we thought that was a good idea,” says Sam.

“It was awesome,” says Dean. “And we’re still alive.” Looking at it that way, Dean’s OK with a lot of the calls they’ve made.

“I don’t think it actually works as bug spray when it’s on fire,” says Sam. Because it’s important he spend his sixty-ninth birthday second-guessing stuff that saved his argumentative ass forty-seven years back. “And the cans are under pressure, exposing them to flame is dangerous.”

“Sometimes, before I go to sleep, I go over all the things you’re wrong about,” says Dean. “I’ve got them all up here, Sammy.” He taps his forehead. 

Sam’s looking at him with idiotic fondness, like they’ve still got all the time in the world and he wants to spend it with Dean. Even now that makes Dean’s heart skip a beat, sheer disbelief. It’s OK, though. There’s nothing wrong with Dean’s heart. It can take it.

“And how’s that working out for you?” Sam asks.

“Good,” says Dean. “It’s working good. I sleep like a baby. You should try it.”

“Dude,” says Sam, “If I tried to list even half the stuff you’re wrong about, I’d be up for a week.”

“No, moron,” says Dean. “You go over the stuff _you’re_ wrong about. Think about it real hard.” 

Especially the heart attack thing. Sam still needs to do some serious soul-searching on that one, speeches or no speeches. It will be enough for Dean if Sam just admits he had no fucking right and promises never to do it again.

Sam gets up and comes round the table. Shoves at Dean’s chair and Dean slides back. He doesn’t want Sam to have another fucking heart attack trying to push him around. Sam straddles Dean carefully. The chair gives an ominous creak and Dean grabs at Sam’s ass, just to be sure he doesn’t fall. 

Sam leans in and nuzzles Dean’s ear, kisses the bald patches at his temples. God knows why nature left Sam his hideous crop of hair and deprived the world of Dean’s. Then Sam’s mouth settles over Dean’s and thank God, that means Sam will shut up for a while. Even Sam can’t be wrong and kiss at the same time.

Never lasts, though, Sam shutting up. Not since that long silence after the Wall, and Sam had managed a whole lot of pissy and wrong-headed even then. Now he breaks the kiss and curves his hand around the back of Dean’s skull, gives him another of those goddamn fond smiles, the ones he knows chip away at Dean’s very right rightness. 

“You’ve got lousy taste in sleep aids,” he says against Dean’s lips.

Dean slides his hand up under Sam’s shirt, where the planes of his chest and the curved cage of his ribs are still rising and falling.

“You got a better suggestion, wise guy?” he asks.

Sam rocks forward, slips a hand under Dean’s waistband. His erection presses against Dean, warm and familiar.

“What if I do?” he says. “You going to take me up on it?”

Dean moves his hand a little left, over Sam’s heart.

“Well,” he says, “I could maybe indulge you for once.” Moderate exercise is good. “Seeing as how it’s your birthday. Many happy returns and all that shit.”

Which is a fucking order. As long as Dean plays it down Sam might even follow it. Sam’s heart is with the program, anyway, goes right on beating obediently under Dean’s palm. Sam kisses him again and Dean lets himself get lost in it, because it’s none of that bullshit _not going far_. Sam’s not going anywhere.


End file.
